Cable Services: Three generations of trailblazing

CARA MORNINGSTAR

cmorningstar@sungazette.com

Cable Services, 2113 Marydale Ave., has been operating based out of the Williamsport area since 1964.

The company started under the leadership of John B. Roskowski, who started his career in cable services in 1952 by taking a job at Williamsport Cable until branching out on his own.

He handled things at the helm of the company until 1992.

Today, the current owners are John M. Roskowski, his son, Lynnette Michaels, his daughter, and her husband, Kenneth R. Michaels.

“He was very charismatic, very driven. He came from a poor family background, and he was a Marine in the service,” Lynnette Michaels said about her father.

Jeremy Michaels, grandson and vice president of operations, makes it a three-generational business.

“There was a demand at the time for contractors to go out and build a new plant,” Jeremy Michaels said. “There was very little cable T.V. back then … Because he saw a need for it, he decided at one point to go out on his own, start contracting and building these networks.”

The family business is alive and strong today, honoring their father’s memory.

“It’s something that my father put his whole self into, he lived and died for it,” Lynnette Michaels said. “It was in the blood.”

She said that her son came home from college to say he wanted to be part of the family business.

“Jeremy, our son, took an interest in it very young … he came home and said, ‘what I really like to do is work with my hands, and I’d really like to be in the cable industry. I’d like to come work for you guys,” she said. “He actually started from the bottom up, worked his way to where he is today. He learned everything he could, everything about the business we do.”

She said he shares his grandfather’s drive and natural passion for the cable industry.

“I always liked to work with my hands, and I was always interested in the technical aspect of things. This is a very technical industry,” Jeremy Michaels said. “We mainly work in the wireless cable T.V. and telecommunications industry. Overall, we’re a communications contractor. We get to build a lot of big networks and maintain a lot of big networks.”

The company is based out of Williamsport, but it covers territory across the United States, primarily along the east coast.

“It’s a traveling industry where we move around a lot,” Jeremy Michaels said. “We move from town to town, different areas … It’s an exciting thing to be a part of with new technology, things like that.”

He said they’re the people that set up the actual physical groundwork to grant telecommunications services for everyday people.

“Basically, it’s a big part of what makes society operate,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the communication industry, people might not realize it because we take it for granted. You pick up your cellphone, you look at Facebook … there’s a tremendous amount of infrastructure in the United States that supports that.”

Of course, given that they started in the very beginning of the cable industry, it’s hard to find another contractor that shares their years of experience.

“We’ve been around longer than most contractors because we’re older than 50 years old.” Jeremy Michaels said. “A lot of it is our expertise, our years of experience. We have a lot of history because we built it … We haven’t been around the block, we built the block.”

Great service is important to their company.

“We have a very good team,” he said. “We have a lot of really good employees that are highly skilled in the industry.”

For more information about Cable Services, visit www.cable-services.com or call 1-800-326-9444.